There Are Now More Google Searches for ‘Tumblr’ than ‘Blog’

More people are searching for Tumblr on Google than for competing blogging platforms, including WordPress. What's more, the keyword "tumblr" appears more often in the search box than even the general keyword "blog." Is Tumblr becoming the household name for blogs, like Kleenex is for tissues or Styrofoam is for polystyrene?

More people are searching for Tumblr on Google than for competing blogging platforms, including WordPress. What’s more, the keyword “tumblr” appears more often in the search box than even the general keyword “blog.”

Obama for America’s Laura Olin first tweeted the observation, along with this chart from Google Trends comparing the search terms blog, wordpress, tumblr, and livejournal.

Launched in 2007, Tumblr has quickly skyrocketed past the more established blogging platforms WordPress and LiveJournal, which have each maintained a comparatively steady amount of Google searches since their respective launches — WordPress in 2003 and LiveJournal in 1999.

Is Tumblr becoming the household name for blogs, like Kleenex is for tissues or Styrofoam is for polystyrene?

Not necessarily. According to Experian, it’s not uncommon for internet users to type in the name of the site they wish to visit on Google rather than accessing the URL directly through their browsers.

The Daily Dot points to an overall decline in blogging itself. It’s interesting to note that “blog” was the reigning search term until November 2012.

This was the same month that Tumblr became a top ten online destination, according to Quantcast. Tumblr’s blogging format favors images rather than text, which are easy to consume. The site now hosts 87.7 million blogs and garners 17.6 billion page views per month.

In an interview with Forbes, Tumblr founder David Karp said, “The growth we’ve seen in the last year just totally overshadows everything that came before it. To be honest, it’s a place I never thought we’d be.”